Government and Civic Affairs

When driving down a busy street in Atlanta, you may find yourself on a different road without making a turn. These seemingly nonsensical street name changes are due to past residential segregation practices enacted when white Atlantans did not want to share the same address as Blacks.

Atlanta History Center is using our resources to explore the history of the components that make a healthy democratic system, including methods of civic engagement, widespread and informed voter participation, civil rights, and community leadership.

Board of Park Commission Minute Books hold significant information, reflecting the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in urban spaces during the early twentieth century.

Atlanta History Center records, preserves, and makes accessible the stories of men and women who did serve as well as the civilians who supported them. Their stories allow future generations to hear directly from those who lived through our nation’s conflicts to better appreciate the realities and the sacrifices of war.

We created a guide to help Georgians prepare to exercise their right to vote, select the method by which they vote, and to identify and report instances of voter intimidation––on November 2 and beyond.

Atlanta History Center is home to one of the nation’s most comprehensive collections of Civil War memorabilia including a growing number of rare objects identified specifically with African American USCT soldiers and regiments such as a canteen, swords, a rifle, brass drum, knapsack, Bible, badges, a Medal of Honor, and a USCT flag.

Atlanta History Center online exhibition: American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith

Atlanta History Center online exhibition: Responding Heroes: Remembering September 11, 2001

This summer, along with history and civics organizations across the country, we invite you to join in a program dedicated to the Civic Season.

In 1962, Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. ordered the construction of a barricade served to sever the main line connecting the white and Black sections of the Cascade Heights neighborhood.

For more than fifty years, Ethel Mae Matthews worked tirelessly for greater welfare rights for Atlanta’s poor and disabled.

Get the real story behind the 1886 cyclorama painting, The Battle of Atlanta.

Congressman Andrew Young and his son Bo run down the hallway of the Rayburn House of Representatives Building in Washington in June, 1975.

Atlanta Mayor-elect Maynard Jackson makes a speech on election night on October 3, 1973 at the Sheraton-Biltmore Hotel in Midtown.